If you're hugely successful, who is going to be upset?
Today is the day and I'll know the great finale. You can tell that it's like whittled to the top.
I knew I had to bring it. We're going to take you through a lot of training exercises. I really want to teach you something that you can take back to your company and apply.
Why is these? You learn more in your defeats than you do in your successes.
These are really, really talented founders building really wild things.
I'm Tim Draper. I'm traveling the globe to find game-changing entrepreneurs with world-transforming ideas. Thousands apply, but only top entrepreneurs have made the cut for a chance to win an investment of $1 million US. It's a journey packed with unforgettable moments.
Welcome everybody to Meet the Drapers where we interview entrepreneurs that come from all over the world and eventually come to a day like today which is the great finale. We are so excited to be here. We are now down to these six entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Draper, venture capitalist. Been doing it a long time.
This is Rob Solomon. Rob has been the center of every major internet revolution from Yahoo to Groupon. You were also at EA when you started your career pre-internet even. And what are you going to be looking for here?
The best entrepreneurs, they have an unfair advantage. That's one. And then I'm looking for missionaries in Silicon Valley. There's been a lot of mercenaries who have descended here and then all over the world. Those mercenaries never really make it. It's the missionaries who are going against the grain, who have a belief, who will bust through walls, who will do anything and everything to make it happen.
We've got to welcome Rob Solomon Draper to the Draper family. So, welcome to the Draper family, Rob.
I just always wanted a second brother.
Just slightly older brother.
On my right, we have Adam Draper, innovator, and he was the first ever Bitcoin accelerator.
Sounds like you've been at it for 50 years almost.
And Booth started out as an accelerator and now it's a major venture capital.
We've invested in 600 companies. We write 500k checks and we look for the magical, the mutants, and the historic.
Ooh, I like that. I like it. One more thing about Adam, just so you know. He is a Draper, but his eyebrows have drooped down to below his nose. You're still part of the family.
My kids love that my eyebrows never grow up here and only down here.
Adam, what are you going to be looking for in these entrepreneurs?
I like they have an unfair advantage. I am always looking for, hey, are we creating superpowered heroes who really like you believe that this is the only thing they could be doing? Why don't we bring on the first entrepreneur?
Let's do it. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scene. This is where you do the eyebrows, but he can...
I knew nothing. I knew we had to take like sport clothes and that's it.
I was a little nervous because really outside of my wheelhouse. Felt a bit carsick in the back.
I knew it was going to be exhausting.
I was just waiting for the fireworks to go off.
Rock rocks. I love him. They literally work all the year training entrepreneurs.
Welcome to the farm everyone. What we're going to do today is we're going to take you through a lot of training exercises which should be fun but also hard. I really want to teach you something that you can take back to your company and apply. Our expectation is for you to grow to a billion dollars or more, right? So, if you can't get to a billion dollars, you shouldn't be here. Tim will be out here, get that extra little edge on maybe who he should invest in. So, you be evaluated from all different angles. Work hard today. Give it everything you have. Any questions at all?
Let's do it. Let's get it. All right.
We're so proud and we're so excited to be here. Lucky we live fairly close so we could pop in. Very excited.
Can't miss a big day like this. And she's kind of like, go get it.
We are Muse Bio and we use menstrual blood stem cells to make better drugs and therapies. When I was 23, I was immobilized by a severe spine injury, and it's left me with chronic pain that I have to manage daily. But I have some amazing news, which is that between the first pitch of Meet the Drapers and this finale, my team and I have literally built a platform that will allow me to treat myself and millions of others. And let me tell you how we're going to do that. Women release millions of stem cells every month when they menstruate. And these cells are superior to all other stem cell sources. They heal without scarring and they grow twice as fast as any other stem cell. And that makes them the best fit for regenerative medicine at scale and that is exactly what we're doing. So the Muse Bio platform, one source, menstrual blood, many solutions. We've got ingredients, products, and clinical therapies. So, we've set up their donor collection sites. We've set up the lab and stem cell bank. We've set up the donor community. And we even have a product that is making money. Now, the skincare manufacturers want our menstrual rejuvenating powers. And so, we are able to fund our R&D while making people look young and beautiful.
How many more stem cells did you say it was than ordinary blood?
So a rough calculation is that there are 300 to 600,000 times more stem cells that can be from menstrual blood than from the blood in your veins.
Okay. What business population or politician would be upset by what you do and what might you be up against?
Now, there's been a whole push back against stem cells because there's this notion that you need to have an abortion. It comes from fetuses. It comes from like embryos. And we don't need to do that anymore. We can get it straight from the source. No ethical barriers.
Women have been having menstrual blood for a long time.
Yeah. Been around for a while.
And so, like, what kept us from actually using the stem cells in order to make human lives better?
The world wasn't ready for at-home medicine or this concept that there's so much more to our bodies than what we previously knew. And I think we're really in the right moment where people are ready. Plus, social stigma has changed a lot.
In the US, we really have a lot of potential to continue to rewrite that narrative because it's a topic that's not spoken about often. And when you think about your business, you're really building two companies, the aesthetics and the therapeutics. How do you think about running two companies at the same time? And which do you really want to pursue in the biggest way? Is it aesthetics or is it therapeutics? Or do you really think you can do both?
When this aesthetics explodes, we're going to hire someone who's going to lead that, that's their passion. This will continue to feed into the therapeutics and that is where our team is hyper-focused and it looks like within next couple of years we can have a therapeutic on the market in people and it opens doors to everything else.
All right, Juliet, thanks so much for coming to Meet the Drapers.
Well done. I think nailing a two-minute pitch is a huge challenge. You want to include all the details that feel important, but you can only include like 1% of them.
I don't know. I felt like a lot of progress has been made. Focus is starting to be had and they're going to gather up all these stem cells and then you don't know where they're going to be used. They're just going to be used to create new amazing possibilities. And that's exciting.
Yeah. Can she actually do therapeutics and aesthetics? Should she choose one and then sequence it to go to the other? I'd be a little bit skeptical of doing both simultaneously because startups are so hard.
Everything's stacked up against you. Trying to do two startups at once is challenging. But if one feeds the other and you sequence it properly, it's kind of brilliant.
All right, with that, let's bring on the next entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes today. Our first activity is going to be paintball. Our lead instructor is Ryan. Getting you trained up. He's been national champion, world champion.
And when we get into these situations that are very high pressure and very high paced, you can step back and be like, 'What were you thinking at this moment? Why'd you do this?' A lot of times in business, it takes a long time to figure that out. And that's what's great about paintball. It's kind of like high-speed chess with guns. So, just like any game, there's a board.
We're going to take the red team inside now.
My shooters, listen up. This is your bomb. So you guys cannot touch it or move it, but you have to defend it. They don't know where the bomb is. They only have a general idea of what it even looks like. And we'll see how well they communicate that.
We know where they're coming out from.
Oh, it could be like here.
I will. I will. If they come from inside, cuckoo. If they come from outside, kaka.
You think we should do the whole circle the thing? We go from different sides.
I think so.
So we send Nick first. Circle the wagon two on two.
And we're going to send the bait. So, we're going to check if that hiding spot is still working.
I like it. Goggles on, barrel covers off. Kevin, come with me real quick. Inside is a terrorist group. They have a small bomb in there. You got to find it. Once you grab it with deactivator, it looks like this. And it's blue.
3, 2, 1, Go go go go go. 8 minutes.
So, if you see a blue bomb, you have to grab it and take it out.
Oh, thank you.
Quick open.
There goes the bait.
There. I don't think it should come from here.
Yeah.
There's someone inside.
Careful.
Go.
You hit on your loader. Come on out.
I got to be man.
We got Jayla and Kevin.
It is inside.
SORRY CAMERAMAN.
ALL RIGHT, NOW THEY'RE BOTH DEAD. Game over.
I mean, major adrenaline rush for sure.
You lost very convincingly.
You guys tried to at least kind of like break out a little bit, but the defense was significantly better in the aspect where they're like, well, we know they have to go to these areas.
You learn more in your defeats than you do in your successes. We gave Kevin a vital piece of information that there's a blue bomb. Did you stop everything?
And collect. Okay. So, you had eight minutes. As you're walking down, he's telling you all blue bomb, blue bomb, and they're getting distracted.
And they're about to go into a firefight.
You can stop, collect everyone. Make sure everyone knows about it. You can change your plan.
Taking the time to restrategize when you learn something new is really important. Planning ahead but also being adaptable and be able to understand which is the best team play.
Anytime that I'm on a stage, of course you're a competitor. You want to compete. But when you're in a crowd with people that you love and adore for, you know, them being brave enough to take on something as hard and audacious as being a founder and a startup, you know, you're rooting for them as well.
I work Live. We're the world's first autonomous road-to-rail solution. I've been in logistics for about 25 years. I started my career off in the US Army and then one thing that I saw across the entire line was logistics was broken. We had road that is extremely congested, rail severely underutilized and the process that bridges the gap is broken. On top of it, it takes about two to six weeks for a fully loaded trainer to depart from its point of embarkation and they charge you for it. The first mile logistics costs for about 75% of total landed cost and we're here to fix it today. What we've come up with is a core technology where we have one vehicle, one move, one person, no people at all. We've developed a gliderverse what we call it where we have the vehicle at the top is called Raiden. It is our fully autonomous vehicle with remote capabilities for human in the loop for defense as well as industrial parks where compliance isn't really a big deal. You're low on staff, you're low on people, but you want to get the job done and I'll show you exactly what it looks like. What you see on the screen here is Ezra 16. This is our AI orchestration tool and you're able to input your logistical load and then control the vehicle from the safety of where you are. Raiden has the ability to get underneath any road-based trailer and any rail-based cart with little to no modification. We utilize infrastructure that is there in place today. So, no new infrastructure needed and then we have the only patent in the world. One of the things about rail is there's a lot of derailments. So, we're able to look and do inspection while it's on it. But as you see, we're able to get underneath a 20ft container, pick it up ourselves.
Once they see this up and operating and it's starting to make money, they're going to compete and they'll be like big businesses with big money. How do you feel like you can compete with them? And is it just the patent or are you feeling like, hey, just this first mover advantage might be something else?
Yeah, I feel it's a combination of both. The patent gets you across the line so you can have some technical moat on it. But the next one is we're the first ones to actually do it.
Where is it best used and how are you thinking about developing the distribution of this?
Absolutely. So my answer to that is everywhere. Always. All the time.
Okay. Everywhere. Always. All the time. It sounds like this is something that is so obvious that should have happened 20, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago. Because I think I get a sense of who you're helping, but who's going to really be pissed off when you're doing this everywhere?
Yeah, I didn't finish my whole pitch. I got past the video and then to the, you know, dual use slide and it was like a stop.
We will get some push back in the beginning from unionized ports or unionized railroads. But the great thing about it, there's part union and then there's part non-union.
Why is it so much cheaper to go by rail than to go by the roads? Is it more friction?
When you're on road, you're dealing with disparate materials. So you have a rubber road to a rock or asphalt or dirt. So you have to generate a lot more force to move that mass. Whereas on rails you propel based on metal in the metal. So you have no friction in between it.
Terrific. Thank you Kevin the Mo. That was great.
Some folks you have to demonstrate to them that the new way of doing things is better for your longevity because that's the way the world has evolved. The unions are hard to bust. If they don't want to use this system, they will not use this system. So, he has to figure out a way to play nice with the unions at the ports and everywhere else that they exist.
Everything everywhere all at once always makes me think, okay, let's just get one thing from one place to another place. This is like if you had a trillion dollars and you actually wanted to upend the entire system and rebuild it from the ground up. I love it. I think it's an incredible vision. I think one of the big issues is radical prioritization.
You know, they all are trying to either boil the ocean or build a space shuttle or solve everywhere always all the time. And if they don't focus, they'll die. Big vision is important, but then bringing it down to saying no to everything except the to your point, you know, what should they choose and how should they execute and how should they prove it?
Dude, radical prioritization. Rob, you got the... this is... I'm taking notes, man. Let's bring on our next entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.
Welcome to the next exercise, guns. How to shoot a gun safely. We'll start you off on rifles, which is what I consider the safest way to learn how to shoot. And then after that, we'll go to pistols. I love bringing you out to the range. When you're shooting a firearm, you got to control your breathing. You have to control all these different biomechanics.
Never shot a paintball gun or shot a regular gun.
I've shot before. I've never shot pistol.
First time I ever learned how to meditate was when I was shooting a long rifle.
And I didn't know it at the time, but they're teaching me, hey, control your breath.
In Canada, we're allowed to shoot large firearms. So, I did shoot a .22 before, but I've never been able to shoot a handgun. That was pretty sweet.
You can control your mind. You just need to pause and set it.
Being focused and being aware of our breathing.
They're small devices that can hurt people very badly and kill people. That's a lot of power to wield casually.
The instructor said something really important that it kept resonating in my mind. Fast is slow and slow is fast.
So, you're low again.
There it is.
I see what you mean.
90%.
Good hit.
Whoa. That's what I'm talking about.
We're going to go head-to-head in a shooting competition and figure out who the top shooter is. The rules are simple. One side will be red, the other side will be white. If you flip all the targets over, the competition's over. You have 10 rounds. Once you get done with your 10 rounds, you're done.
When we saw boys versus girls, okay, easy.
Shooter, stand by. Shoot.
Victoria was amazing. When we went to handguns, I was like, we're out.
Is that my strong suit?
Score is girls one, boys zero.
Oh no. Come on, Juliet.
Go down.
Oh [__].
Yes. Yes, girl. Yes, girl.
And I was in a bad shot. Apparently, the ladies, they catch on to things fast. Someone gives you a configuration or a blueprint. You read it and you digest it and you apply it. That's what I saw from Vicki and Juliet.
I'm normally keen to doing things fast, fast, fast. But sometimes actually like going a little bit slower and you will hit the target.
So, I was pretty confident about the pitch. Definitely nervous, but also excited compared to last time when I was like, it could go anywhere.
In the last 200 years, we've relied on microscopes for medical diagnostics. But here's the thing. Microscopes were designed for the human eye, but to this day, lab testing is manual, subjective, and represents massive inefficiencies in the healthcare system. AI transforms imaging into machine-readable data. Our holographic system captures cells in 3D and our AI transfers those scans into machine-readable data and biological signals. We collect 60 times more data points. We do it 50 times faster and 20 times cheaper than a standard microscope. And we've already validated this in our first application in semen analysis. We've trained our AI on 400,000 data points over clinical trials and pilots and we're achieving 99.6% accuracy in testing. At its core, Alumicel AI can analyze cells in any fluids. That's semen, urine, that's blood for immunoncology and autoimmune diseases. We're even discussing menstrual blood with Juliet right now. And each scan we do represents new data. And over time, that data compounds into a massive data set, a platform that can power new diagnostics, new devices, new research, drug discovery and development platforms, and so much more.
If you're hugely successful, who is going to be upset?
As we started traveling, going to conferences and actually speaking to doctors and investors in those countries like Saudi Arabia, Morocco, we discovered that it's a huge problem that they also want to solve. And you know, the taboo is kind of going away. More and more people are talking about male health and what fertility means for male health.
Most go into business thinking, I'll have the best tech, I'll make people's lives better, and they don't realize that there's actually so much more to it.
Fertility issue overall. It's an economic issue and you don't want to let that happen to your country like it happened with Japan which is why we're so successful there.
Are you selling equipment? Are you selling data? Are you selling services? Are you doing all of it?
So what we're selling at first we're selling to clinics, doctors, labs. We will be selling the equipment itself. So that's our imaging module that is capturing the data. There will be subscription to our AI and there will also be consumables. So we have to put the fluid in a consumable and put it into our machine for analysis.
What's your first customer and what are they doing with it?
We have a waitlist of urologists and clinics that have actually filled out our round. It was 70% our future customers. They would buy our imaging module. They would subscribe to our software and get our consumables.
Do they get the microscope too?
Yeah. So it's kind of like an espresso machine. It's really tiny. We've already installed it in several medical centers in the United States and people love that it's so small that they don't need to really think about extra space.
This is a razor and blade model. Then you are getting the machine installed and then your annuity is forever as long as that machine is there.
Yeah, exactly. And there is also the software subscription and we get the data and data is eventually our moat.
Well, Jayla, thanks so much for coming to the show, making it through survival.
I like the razor and blades. That's the ultimate model if you can really deliver on it.
Yeah. I mean, all I wrote down was does it work and then can you make 10 of them and then can you sell a hundred of them? And like she made it sound like they have these in a couple places. I didn't quite... I couldn't... The other eyes are interesting and just converting them is the big opportunity, the big challenge.
Yeah, this is the move. Like this is what medicine's coming to, right? Like that's going to start happening and that's exciting.
Oh man, these are fantastic.
Hey, Meet the Drapers, baby. This thing's working.
You can tell that it's like whittled to the top. These are really, really talented founders building really wild things. It's great.
Living in the future. Great. Okay, with that, let's bring on our next entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.
Is that him?
Oh my god, it's him.
I was worried about the cold plunge. Like literally thinking about the cold plunge the whole morning.
When Tim shows up, he always brings this energy and then we went straight to the cold bath.
I think what saved me from panicking was that I had never done that before.
Found you now.
Can you guys dance?
Okay. Sign this.
Wait, your name?
My name is Victoria Gustavas.
Victoria, so nice to meet you.
Welcome. Tell me what you're doing.
Clinical grade psychedelics for mental health for depression.
Before you got in here...
Once I was in there talking, it was like I forgot that I was in the ice water. And then when I was done, I was like, 'Oh man, I'm still in the ice water.'
Am I going slowly enough? Okay, you're... just hung in there. Just hang in there. And what saved me was literally when it was my turn to pitch.
It is really nice of you to come by my office. Heads down. 1, 2, 3.
I wasn't as afraid as the girls.
I did it.
I suppose it's because I didn't know how that feel.
Like Tim sitting in there just like chilling, you know, like he was sitting in the sauna. Put you in a warm mood.
Tell me about your business. I might ask a few questions and we'll see how it goes.
It was like what the [__] is this?
Algorithms that are detecting fires hours faster than us.
Every competitor.
Tim's ability to withstand a cold bath. Impressive at his age. He didn't seem to have any problem in his office.
We are the world's first company to develop a high throughput drug miniaturized and automated laboratory.
My body hit that water, man. It was cold, but once I was in it, this is where I'm supposed to be at.
You've been in here long enough. Have you been... You doing fine? Yeah. Okay. Let's just sit here for a while.
Yeah, it feels pretty good.
I think it opened up something new for me.
I had the real mind game like Victoria versus Victoria. I experienced a lot of emotions. I don't know how many minutes it was but I think the conclusion is everything is on your mind and you can definitely control your mind.
My time to shine and my time to show what my team has done was today. And that's where I knew I had to bring it. My name is Kyle Asherno and our mission at Exobiosphere is to extend and improve health on Earth and also in space. And we do that by finding cures in space. Brain cancer, blood cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, metastatic cancer, ALS, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, heart disease. The most debilitating and destructive diseases on Earth can be cured in space. In space, cells form into 3D structures, which are much more physiologically accurate ways to study disease progression and therapeutic response. Currently, the technology is stuck in the past. On the international space stations, astronauts are pipetting by hand or using static systems which can only conduct dozens of tests. And that was the genesis of Exobiosphere. We started with three fundamental constraints. The size, the functionality, and we had to ensure that it would be standardized. And for the first time today, gentlemen, I'm happy to show you that our prototype is ready. Here you see the system where you insert the cells into our laboratory. Inside of the laboratory, you have robotic arms that are removing these standardized well plates and putting them inside of our microfluidics dispenser. The robotic arm takes the well plates and puts it back into the system. You can see we have six plates which allows us to do up to 2,000 tests. This is 100 times more than what has ever been possible before. And finally, while we do intend to allow other people to use the platform, our intention is to do our own longevity-based missions so we can develop our own AI-based space models and bring more cures to people on Earth and eventually in space.
If you can grow a cancer super fast in space, then how is that going to help us solve cancer?
What our customers are paying us for is for the entire turnkey service. So they provide us with their cells and the drugs they want to test. We ship it up to space, we conduct the tests, and then we bring back that data and their cells and give it back to them.
Like we don't have this on Earth. So why do space?
It's a great question. In fact, as we were advertising this platform in space, one of our potential customers asked to buy the terrestrial unit, and we made a sale. This microfluidic system does exist. We bought it off the shelf, but never has anyone miniaturized this and put it into a system about the size of a microwave. So we have terrestrial sales already.
How do you compare to other people fighting to get on the spaceships to get up there into the space stations? You have to have a very valuable payload in order to get the spot.
Rob was awesome. It was clear that he was really interested in our technology. I felt like he was going to approach it maybe with a bit of a more commercial hat on. There is no system like this that can conduct the throughput. We're talking about thousands of tests that are being conducted. This is just the beginning of something extremely exciting.
Kyle, thanks so much for being on the show.
Great to see you. Thanks for coming. We as a species know very, very little about what is happening biologically in our bodies.
Wow. I'm blown away. The hundred times thing is remarkable. But the 3D, the cells converting to 3D, I never knew that. And that I think creates incredible opportunities to understand and study them at a much deeper level. So he's on to something that makes a lot of sense.
Pharma is trying to do experiments in space. That is true. And we haven't been able to do many because you have to go up to the ISS. They do have to pipet, which is like a ridiculous thing in space. Man, imagine being a scientist and just being like, 'Okay, this thing is this little fluid.' And then it just like floats off. That's basically their job. They're trying to digitize. We're trying to get closer to digitization of all this, and we need data to be able to digitize. So with that, let's bring on our next entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.
Finalists, this is your next challenge. We're breaking you into two teams. Your goal is to build a boat and get all three of you across to the other side of the lake. You got to get out of the boat, get back on the boat, and come back. You will get points for being dry and first one back.
So, I've built a boat before. The best strategy is like one arrives totally dry, the other ones are going to swim super fast.
The guys, you know, they look to me to lead. The mechanical engineer on the team, the person that builds vehicles. I never built boats.
We had a plan of putting like three barrels and attach them with ropes and with tape, a passenger in the middle, and then two paddlers.
Kevin could tie super good knots. I thought we were building a pretty solid boat.
We were very quick and dirty about it. I was pulling ropes and tying knots. I loved our boat. It was amazing.
Bring it up. Okay. I need all six of you here. Never done this before. You three get that boat and you three get that boat.
It felt very Timothy way. We are going to do is...
